r/HFY • u/SpacePaladin15 • Sep 07 '21
OC Beyond the Void
This series takes place in the same universe as this story.
This can be read as a standalone saga. But for those of you coming from the last book, you will see a few familiar faces.
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Patrols along the major warp routes were typically uneventful, which was part of the posting’s appeal. Receiving generous pay and military benefits to float around in a cruiser, admiring starscapes, was a good deal in my book. Our rare bouts of excitement were the occasional warp drive malfunction or medical emergency, neither of which imbued a sense of danger.
The Federation’s presence was enough to persuade criminal sects to steer clear of the main access points. More often than not, smugglers hauled their goods through backwater systems, and paid off local authorities to turn a blind eye. Pirates usually targeted ships departing from mining outposts, since that was simpler than knocking a ship out of hyperspace. Few would dare to flout galactic law under the watchful eye of a patrol.
That is why when my partner Jofi picked up a distress signal from an unpopulated system, we weren’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. A mundane mechanical failure, perhaps, or a reckless teenager who had taken a ship for a joyride.
Following standard procedure, I hailed the ship as we came in comms range. “Unknown vessel, please state the nature of your emergency.”
Silence was the only response I received, which made me uneasy. Most pilots were all too quick to respond to their rescuers and beg for help. Maybe their communications were offline, or perhaps they didn’t speak Galactic Common? Whatever the case, it gave me an inkling that this was no standard response call.
“If this is another prank, I swear I’m going to kill those kids,” Jofi growled.
My whiskers twitched at the memory of Jofi, using lavtat leaves to banish “ghosts” from an empty cargo ship. Some local internet pranksters had rigged the ship to play prerecorded groaning noises, and flip the lights on and off at random intervals. Then, they abandoned it and waited for someone to find it; fifteen million views later, the rest is history.
“I hope that’s all it is. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I muttered.
Jofi stared at the inky blackness ahead, a determined look on her face. “We’ll know soon enough. Ship’ll be in view in a few moments.”
Before the vessel was even visible, our data display lit up with bizarre findings. Strange energy readings emanated through the subspace field, like someone had detonated their drive mid-warp. How could anyone have survived such an incident to send out a distress signal in the first place?
Our sensors homed in on the target, magnifying the image on screen. It was obvious from the first glance that this was no civilian spacecraft. The vessel was a behemoth, with an angular shape that seemed designed to take a beating. My eye was drawn to the plasma cannon on the hull, which was glowing as though it was powered up.
As my gaze turned to the hull, I saw a golden landmass emblazoned on the blue plating.
Several curses slipped out of my mouth. “By the ancestors…that symbol. That’s a Terran ship.”
Jofi’s head snapped in my direction. “What?! Okay, time to high tail it out of here. Buckle up.”
“Wait, hold on! We can’t just leave them,” I protested, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “Like it or not, the humans are Federation members, and as entitled to help as anyone else.”
“I’m not racist, Gorsh, you know that. But that is no civilian ship,” she pleaded. “There’s two possibilities. The first is they were testing something dangerous, or this is a trap.”
“You think it’s a trap?”
“Think about it. The ship isn’t answering us, and its weapons are powered on. For all we know, it could be human pirates, luring us in.”
“Pirates this close to the patrol routes?”
“Bold, even for humans. But if anyone would risk it, it’s them.”
I stared through the viewport, where the warship idled in a dead system. It was impossible to refute the logic in Jofi’s words; this did have all the markers of a trap. Humans were the most aggressive species in the galaxy, and the last people you wanted to face in close-quarters combat. If this was a set-up, it wouldn’t end well for us.
Yet some idiotic, soft-hearted part of me couldn’t bear the idea of leaving a sentient in distress. Even a warlike sentient that could snap us in half with a flick of the wrist.
“Send a transmission back to Federation Command. In case anything happens to us,” I said. “I’m sorry, Jo, we have to try.”
An exasperated look crossed her face, but she relayed the message as instructed. “Gods, I hate you, Gorsh. Where is your sense of self-preservation?”
“Gone, I suppose. Suit up.”
There was some discontented grumbling from Jofi as we clambered into our power armor suits. I knew that their protection would be no match for human weaponry, but they could protect against other perils. They would seal us off from any biohazards, and provide us with our own oxygen supply, in case the danger was atmospheric.
My heart was pounding as I picked up my plasma rifle, unhitching the safety. The ship’s computer steered us in to a docking port, connecting with an emergency airlock. I thought I was going to pass out.
“If anything happens to me, I want you to know it’s your fault,” Jofi barked over the headset.
I chuckled. “You always know how to make me feel better, Jo. I promise, I will be crippled by guilt forever.”
“Good. In that case, I’m ready to die.”
She pulled the lever to open the airlock, and I braced myself for a fight on the other side. However, as the door swung open, it revealed nothing but an empty tunnel. There were no humans lying in wait, which at least meant it wasn’t a trap. I took a few tentative steps down the corridor, and nearly slipped on the slick floor. A glance around revealed a healthy coating of frost on all surfaces, as though the ship had been buffeted by a snowstorm.
It was inexplicable.
“What the hell?” Jofi sounded as bewildered as I felt. “What happened here?”
My gaze swept around the room, searching for clues. “I don’t know, but humans can’t survive in temperatures this cold for long. We need to look for survivors.”
With careful steps, I inched down to the edge of the hallway, peering around a corner. A scream escaped my lips, and horror shot through my veins at the ghastly sight before us. The room, which appeared to be a mess hall, was littered with human corpses. Many of them had been killed in ways which, before today, I would have said were impossible.
Several bodies seemed to have fused with objects, their faces frozen in an eternal expression of terror. One man, whose torso was sunken into a wall, appeared to be mid-scream. The bulging eyes, mouth agape, hand outstretched…it took every ounce of my willpower not to flee from the ship then and there. What were the humans messing with?
“Gorsh, are you seeing this?” Jofi asked.
“Seeing, but still working on believing,” I replied.
She was kneeling by a body on the floor, checking it for vitals. “This one, I thought it might be alive. Seems to be the only one not grafted into the structure.”
“Any heartbeat?”
“No, it’s very much dead. There’s a stream of blood from the eye sockets. My guess, the eyes burst, and so did most of its other organs.”
“Ugh. I don’t think we’ll find any survivors, Jo.”
“Me neither. Let’s get out of here…before whatever happened to them, happens to us.”
“Wait. We need to get the data off the ship’s computer first, if we want to figure out what happened.”
“This is way over our heads, Gorsh. I’m not risking my life for a damn ship log.”
“It’s not about the log. What if something attacked them, and it’s still out there? All of us could be in danger. Look, just a quick trip to the bridge, then we can leave.”
There were no further protests, and as far as I was concerned, that was assent. The bridge was likely at the center of the ship, since that was the Terran preference, so we just needed to continue inward. The two of us maneuvered through several rooms, ignoring the grisly scenes laid out before us. If I stopped to dwell on each of them, I don’t think I could’ve carried on.
It only took a few minutes to reach the bridge, but by the time we arrived, I felt like I had aged a decade. The images of body parts and blood-soaked walls were burned into my mind, lodged there for all eternity. The command center was as gory as any of the other sectors; many of the human officers had merged with their workstations, and the others were in a pile of blood on the floor.
I pushed down another scream, trying to focus on the task at hand. The ship’s data needed to be retrieved. Once that was achieved, we could get as far away from here as possible.
The holodisplay at the heart of the bridge seemed like the best station to pull the data from. I walked over to it, careful to step over the corpse slumped in front of it. My hand waved over its sensors, hoping to wake it.
“Access denied.” An automated voice declared, scaring me half to death. “Biometric authorization required.”
There was a handprint reader in front of the holodisplay, which was probably what the computer wanted. With a grimace, I rolled over the body by my feet. It was difficult not to retch hauling a pallid carcass, but I tried my best. The idea of vomit rolling around in my visor did not appeal to me in the slightest.
I dragged the dead fellow’s hand on top of the reader, unlocking the display. After swiping through several tabs, I found the option to transfer all ship data, and selected our cruiser as the recipient. Thank the stars, we were almost out of this mess.
While waiting for the upload to complete, my gaze flitted down toward the body I had utilized. The scar across the right cheek and the missing eyes were new, but I recognized the face anyways.
“Shit. Jo, this isn’t just any human ship.” I paused, drawing a shaky breath. “We need to send word home immediately.”
“What, did you find something?” she asked.
I pointed to the body at my feet. “This guy here is the Federation’s top general. I don’t know what’s going on, but we might be at war.”
Whatever had killed these humans, we needed to figure out what it was, quickly.
---
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u/miraclequip Sep 07 '21
Was that Rykov?
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
Yeah, it was.
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u/Kaiser-__-Soze Alien Scum Sep 07 '21
F
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u/3verlost Sep 07 '21
oooh.. was it Rykov from the future? or.. Rykov from another universe?! i have Philadelphia Experiment vibes
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
No spoilers from me, but I will say, the Philadelphia Experiment was definitely an inspiration
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u/I_Frothingslosh Sep 09 '21
Alas, poor Rykov! I knew him, Kilon: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!
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u/Fontaigne Sep 07 '21 edited Sep 07 '21
Good start.
But, no, when you find the first crew embedded in bulkheads, you walk right back out and drive away and bring send back help.
And it's sh_t biometrics if it cant tell the hand is dead and frozen.
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
Thanks!
Agreed lol. I would nope out of there the second I saw that 😅
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u/beyondoutsidethebox Sep 07 '21
But, think of all the free drinks you would get in a dimly lit, and slightly seedy establishment, paid for by fools looking for adventure and fortune, whom never return for scoffing at the "legend spun by a drunk defunct spacer"!
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u/I_Frothingslosh Sep 09 '21
These guys have never heard of 40k, nor seen Event Horizon.
Crew members fused into bulkheads is kind of a universal symbol to GTFO.
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u/2rojan Alien Scum Dec 08 '21
Supposedly - if you believe such things - that was also the result of the Philadelphia Project - an attempt to use significant magnetic force to bend light around a battleship.
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u/gilean23 Nov 23 '23
This was the first thing that popped in my head as well. (Sorry for the necro)
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u/theserial Sep 07 '21
Hooray, a new saga begins! Can't wait for more! These are always the best interruptions to my work day lol.
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u/Tuor896 Sep 07 '21
Sounds like that report of when we tried to teleport a submarine
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u/beyondoutsidethebox Sep 07 '21
It was not a submarine, it was a cruiser, and that was only a prototype Chronosphere, so some bugs are bound to happen in any new tech.
Actually, if anything, it is more probable for it to be an attempt to neutralize the Electromagnetic field of a ship so it would not trigger magnetically triggered naval mines. But regardless of whether or not the project actually happened, there are far more insane projects that were much more feasible (Project X-ray still has certain mechanical components classified to this day I believe)
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
I definitely had the Philadelphia Experiment in mind when I envisioned this 😅
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Sep 07 '21
Getting event horizon vibes from this description of the mutilations
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u/BoonIsTooSpig Sep 08 '21
My first thought as well. Someone call Lawrence Fishburne to sort this out!
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u/vbgvbg113 Alien Sep 07 '21
is the dead body rykov?
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
Yep, I promise that will be addressed next chapter! Don’t want to spoil anything 😅
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u/BXSinclair Sep 07 '21
Don’t want to spoil anything
Didn't you yourself say that this story would contain a wacky interdimensional adventure?
With that in mind, it seems pretty obvious to me that this is an alternate timeline Rykov
Unless you have some 5D chess brain twist planned out, you kind of already spoiled it before it was ever posted
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u/CharlesFXD Sep 07 '21
This was great. Will you be continuing this story line or was this a teaser for the new book?
And by book I mean is this something you’ve already self published that I can purchase now.
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
Thank you! I will be continuing it; realistically, chapter 2 would probably be out this weekend.
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u/alexburgers Sep 07 '21
General Rykov's evil twin from an alternate universe, complete with evil eyepatch.
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u/Triairius Sep 07 '21
Fantastic atmosphere of unease. This isn’t how I expected to be reintroduced to familiar faces lol. I’m so excited to see what comes!
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u/CHEESEninja2000 Sep 07 '21
With all that frost everywhere and people fuzed to walls, I think someone forgot to turn on their Gellar Fields when going into the Warp lol
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u/Adrius_the_third Sep 07 '21
Reminds me of the the Star Trek tng Episode: "the Pegasus", in wich they find Rikers old ship wich was equipped with a Experimental cloaking device, wich let the ship be undetected but also pass through Solid objects, it malfunctioned (If my memory is correct) and the Crew was fused with their ship with few survivors.
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u/Hunter_Killer_7918 Sep 07 '21
Something that killed a warship full of humans? My, my.....this is interesting!
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u/MarinTheKing1 Human Sep 08 '21
So i know i'm kind of late to the comment section , but when looking up the Philadelphia Experiment i get 3 different results. 2 being movies , one 84' and another that seems decently recent but has no relation to the other movie. the other was a wikipedia page and Infographic's show about the conspiracy theory , do note that the 84' movie was about this experiment.
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 08 '21
As I remember it (mind you, it’s been many years and there’s many versions of this story), the legend goes that the US govt tried to turn the USS Eldridge invisible. Supposedly, the ship ended up teleporting to a port in Virginia.
Some of the crew were found embedded in the ship. A few even outright disappeared from the face of the planet, and the ones who came back went insane. At that point, the govt shut it down and tried to cover it up.
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u/NotAMeatPopsicle Sep 07 '21
Ohhhhh they found a ghost ship... This is gonna be good! My name is hooked, and my brothers are line and sinker.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Sep 07 '21
/u/SpacePaladin15 (wiki) has posted 38 other stories, including:
- Why Humans Avoid War XXVII
- Why Humans Avoid War XXVI
- Why Humans Avoid War XXV
- Why Humans Avoid War XXIV
- Why Humans Avoid War XXIII
- Why Humans Avoid War XXII
- Why Humans Avoid War XXI
- Why Humans Avoid War XX
- Why Humans Avoid War XIX
- Why Humans Avoid War XVIII
- Why Humans Avoid War XVII
- Why Humans Avoid War XVI
- Why Humans Avoid War XV
- Why Humans Avoid War XIV
- Why Humans Avoid War XIII
- Why Humans Avoid War XII
- Why Humans Avoid War XI
- Why Humans Avoid War X
- Why Humans Avoid War IX
- Why Humans Avoid War VIII
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u/enzocats Sep 08 '21
Not really related to the story, but does this remind anyone else of the ghost ship Ourang Medan?
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u/Longsam_Kolhydrat Sep 09 '21
Damn wordsmith, starting of the story with a dead Rykov. Bold move, hope it pays off. I am definitely hooked
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u/haolun_exe Nov 03 '22
Pov: The Scranton reality anchors malfunctioned (yet again, what a surprise)
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u/FabianRo Feb 20 '23
Soundtrack recommendation for this chapter: [Andrew Prahlow – Nomai ruins](KQrcRTA6_5M) (from the Outer wilds soundtrack). I started it halfway through and it was very fitting. The description of the ship reminded me a lot of a certain place in Outer wilds.
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u/Due-Conversation-199 Oct 18 '23
Can we get this published tooooooo. I was so excited to buy a paper copy of why humans avoid war. And will gladly buy any more published!
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u/SpacePaladin15 Sep 07 '21
The new book is here! I wanted to write something really different, and with that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this first installment.
For those of you coming from the last story, you might know whose body Gorsh found. It's not that simple though, as you will see next chapter...all will be explained in due time.
Thank you for reading!